Campaign Monitor is investing heavily in AI and predictive as it pivots towards becoming a CRM platform

Scott Carey |
April 4, 2017

Popular email marketing software maker Campaign Monitor is investing heavily in AI and predictive capabilities for customers of its platform

The key to the acquisition is a drive towards tighter segmentation, targeting and personalisation.

"So inside of Campaign Monitor, especially now with Tagga, we can harvest all of that behavioural data from users and create segments," Bar said. "So you look like this person because of your behaviour, here is a recommendation of a segment of these people. That very much is AI and machine learning because it would be very difficult for a human to map those segments."

By giving marketers these hyper-targeted segments, customers can start to create and deliver highly personalised content using Campaign Monitor, and get reporting down to the actual revenue impact, beyond opens and clicks. In essence, the whole platform becomes closer to a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

"When I think of the core offering today, and include Tagga as part of the company, we now have a system of intelligence and a system of engagement which will be seamlessly merged. We view it as the next-gen B2C CRM," Bard said.

Bard is also looking to expand the channels end users can apply Campaign Monitor to, including various messaging services. He explained: "In Facebook Messenger, if you allow a business to communicate with you they can message you updates on the status of your package, or an offer based on previous behaviour, or customer service.

"So from a marketing perspective through messenger, instead of sending an email through Campaign Monitor, we might send you a message that says 'come and check out this deal' and it would be that sort of interaction."

AI-driven targeting

In a broader sense Bard wants Campaign Monitor to help "data-driven marketers" to target customers "based on what they do, not what they say."

"If you zoom out and think of marketing it has gone from one to all, to one to some based on demographics and stated interest. In the future you want to be more one-to-one, hyper-personalisedwhat we have seen is the more personal, the higher the engagement rates and output you are trying to drive."

These moves shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Bard's background. He sold Assistly a SaaS startup he cofounded to Salesforce in 2011 for $80 million and took up leadership roles at the company under CEO Marc Benioff.

Moving Campaign Monitor into becoming more of a CRM solution, as well as a best of breed software tool in its own segment, is a very Salesforce move. As is bringing predictive insights and suggested actions into the platform, as has recently been seen in the Salesforce suite of products with the launch of Salesforce Einstein.

Lastly, when asked about those IPO rumours Bard said: "We don't think about it and we think about how we continue to build value for customers, which builds value for the business, and I believe we will have a variety of different opportunities, whether it is a float or looks like something else, but we don't target that as a milestone where we are right now."